Archives for October 2007

Google Webmaster Tools is a great resource for any site owner. It’s designed to inform webmasters about how Google bot is interacting with their website. It gives detailed information on broken links, popular keywords and how often Google is stopping by. It’s Googles way of giving site owners the information that they need to be successful.

The Setup

Getting started with Google Webmaster Tools is not to difficult. The first thing you’ll need is a Google account. Since all Google services use the same login, you may already be setup. If you have Gmail, Adwords, Analytics, iGoogle or one of the many other services, then you are ready to go. If not, sign up for a free Google Account.

The end of SMX Social Media in New York is upon us. At the close of the conference today, the audience is leaving with a lot of tips and tricks and “how-to”s to make their social media marketing more effective. The main idea pushed on the audience by nearly every one of the presenters was that social media takes time and research, and when done correctly can increase traffic, links and brand recognition from all over the world.

Raise your hand if you like your opinions to be heard. Good! Thatâ€™s what I though. SMX Social Mediaâ€™s session on answer sharing with Wikipedia (#1 reference site) and Yahoo Answers (#2 reference site) gave insight that appealed to those of us with big mouths and a hankering for research.

Matt McGee, SEO Manager of Marchex, spoke first on Yahoo Answers. Yahoo Answers is a place for users to ask and answer questions. Ask and answer as many as you like, but donâ€™t answer with garbage. Make sure you do your research to provide the best answer to the users. There is even a small search box within the answer submission page where you can do a little online research and provide links in your answer to make it better and more believable. It will help your reputation as a Yahoo Answers contributor.

Do you have an interest in crochet? Extreme ironing? Wearing only green shoes? There is probably a social networking community out there for you so you can connect with like-minded people who share your interests. At SMX Social Media this afternoon Rand Fishkin and Liana Evans both spoke on how to find, use and leverage these smaller social networking communities.

To find these micro communities in your vertical, you can check out the web 2.0 lists of social media lists, search for topic relevance and coverage in a search engine and read the social media discovery blogs. The long tail of social networking sites and micro communities is very, very long. You will be able to find a targeted micro community focused on what your interest is.

When you have all the social media essentials, and you know that you need to be social and active in your social networking communities, how do you effectively leverage that to benefit yourself (and your company)?

The speakers in this session on SMX Social Media Day 2 gave the audience tips and recommendations on how to best use social networking, specifically Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace, to make yourself known in the networking world.

Dave McClure of 500Hats spoke first with a fun tutorial on Facebook. Facebook is great for promoting events and for joining groups to share your brands and ideas and products to those interested in your industry. One of the main characteristics of Facebook that Dave focused on was leveraging the news feed in Facebook.

At the close of Day 1 of SMX Social Media, I reviewed the absolute basics of what I’ve learned over the day: Social Media users love Digg, del.icio.us and StumbleUpon. 🙂

Throughout the day, many speakers from different companies and backgrounds gathered to talk about their love of Digg, how to best use del.icio.us and what tips we needed to know to best utilize StumbleUpon as a marketing tool. We also learned about the importance of tags in social media, and Guillaume Bouchard noted that Technorati, Flickr, Facebook and YouTube were some of the best and most popular social media sites for tags. And since linkbait can drive a significant amount of traffic to your site, retain that traffic by continuing to post interesting content in the days and weeks following your initial linkbait. Don’t tease your visitors. Give them a reason to keep coming back.

Being a designer/developer, I’m very handy at coding and designing all my own posts. Need the text red? No problem. Need other fun formatting? Not an issue. However, not everyone is quite as handy with code as I am. I’ve had many clients ask for additional formatting options when writing blog posts. WordPress has come a long way in adding more formatting options, but there are quite a few people out there that want it all.

Having tested a handful of WYSIWYG plugins for WordPress, the best one I’ve come across so far is FCKeditor. FCKeditor replaces WordPress’ current editor with one that has a lot of additional features. To make it even better, it even writes pretty clean code.

Read an interesting blog post lately? Save it. Want to share it with others? Tag it and make it publicly accessible online. Or maybe you just want a safe place to save an article you will get around to reading on your weekly dive into your del.icio.us account. No problem. Social Bookmarking and Tagging both have this covered for you.

Social bookmarking and tagging arenâ€™t just about saving items for you anymore. Revert back to your preschool rules, and you will find social bookmarking is just â€œsharingâ€ on a global level. How else can you research and trade information with thousands and thousands of people all around the world in an up-to-the-minute fashion?

Drop a viral video into a sea of young and old, democrats and republicans, men and women and voters of all ages (with access to the internet, of course) and you have one of my favorite linkbait videos of the year.

So what is linkbait anyway? Cameron Olthius, CEO of Factive Media, defined it for the audience as content or a feature on a website that compels others to link to it from their website.

Linkbait can very quickly increase brand awareness and can drive a huge amount of traffic to your website. In order to do this, however, you need to make sure the content you are about to promote is link-able.

SMX Social Media kicked off Tuesday morning in the Metropolitan Center in New York with a session entitled Social Media Marketing Essentials. Moderated by Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land, this kickoff session reviewed the basics of what you need to know in the world of SMM.

Rand Fiskin of SEOmoz spoke first of the importance of social media and why it is important. From April 2006 to April 2007, social media use increased by 668%. These statistics are incredible, and with social media usage increasing every day, it is important to make sure you at least understand what it is and if you choose to use it with your company, what you can do with it.

When talking with so many companies of all sizes and types about marketing with social media, many are keen on the idea, but don’t have a clear idea of the best way to incorporate tactics like social bookmarking into their content promotions.Â Anyone can throw up links to Digg, Del.icio.us and Facebook, but does it actually do anything?

The way I see it, two of the most practical ways to approach promoting content via social media sites such as social bookmarking and news would best be characterized as “active” and “passive”. In fact, there are many situations where both make sense.

The kind of promotion I mean is on social news or bookmarking service wheres you can submit a URL, describe and tag it, then others in the community can comment and/or vote.